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Key takeaways from the dataxu Summit – Chicago

Last month, dataxu hosted the first of three regional Summits. Our first stop was Chicago. Over 40 customers traveled from across the Midwest to attend the annual event, featuring a full day of content filled with roadmap discussions, customer panels, peer-to-peer workshops and more. Speakers discussed hot topics such as advanced TV, optimization strategies and emerging formats, with the underlying theme of data-driven marketing. Attendees left with ideas and inspiration shared among their peers, as well as several key takeaways they could act on right away. We’re here to share a few:

What we learned at the Chicago dataxu Summit

1. 2019 will be the year of data-driven TV

Brands and agencies are investing more and more dollars into advanced TV; spending for this channel has reached $6.7B this year and that number is only growing. The media consumption habits for audiences has become increasingly fragmented and is putting pressure on marketers to find new, creative ways to engage with their audiences. We heard this time and time again: By utilizing advanced TV, marketers are able to more specifically target an audience with relevant messaging, while at the same time reducing wasted impressions and collecting more actionable insights.

2. The ability to unify your TV buying strategy is now a reality with TotalTV™

It is no question that the adoption of Connected TV has been rapidly growing this year, but for marketers looking to reach audiences at a large scale, linear TV is still the channel of choice. As digital and linear content and viewership merge, marketers need a better way unify their TV strategy and more efficiently drive results – enter TotalTV™. Fresh off the heels of dataxu’s recent press release, dataxu experts went in-depth and discussed in detail our newest TotalTV™ solutions for advertisers, including unified planning and linear extension. With TotalTV™, brands and agencies can create the most efficient buying plans to reach de-duplicated strategic audiences among more than 120 million households, whether viewers are watching linear TV or streaming through any OTT device. Now, the most appealing element of digital marketing—reaching highly specific, targeted audiences—is available to innovative marketers looking beyond ratings points for their TV buying.

3. Emerging formats like Digital Audio and Digital Out of Home are on everyone’s radar

Rory Edwards, VP of Marketplace at dataxu, hosted a customer panel to discuss some of the most relevant, curated formats and buying modes that you should have on your radar such as digital out-of-home and digital audio. These emerging channels have been increasing in popularity and provide marketers with an opportunity to connect with audiences on-the-go in a highly engaging, unique format.

4. Machine learning across platforms is not created equal

While most (if not all) programmatic partners’ platforms are based off machine learning, what that machine learning actually consists of varies greatly from platform to platform. During our Customer Summit, Dr. Beth Logan, SVP, Chief Data Scientist, and Saket Mengle, Sr. Principle Data Scientist, took our customers “under the hood” of our platform to discuss some key differences. The dataxu platform utilizes the Random Forest Algorithm which means that there are various decision trees that get created based on the data that’s run through the platform. What does that mean? The next generation machine learning applications are specific to dataxu’s platform and include unique attributes such as our Algorithm Marketplace, Open AI for Ads powered by Oracle, and Cruise Control.